IBM is looking to build upon recent cloud momentum – and the company is expanding in Europe after securing several new customers in healthcare, logistics, energy and more.
The announcements showcase how many prospective IBM clients are utilising the company’s cloud for its artificial intelligence, machine learning and blockchain capabilities. Credit Mutuel, a French bank, is deploying IBM Watson virtual assistants across all of its business lines – run on IBM’s cloud in France with a backup in Germany – while Koopman Logistics, based in the Netherlands, will aim to track and trace consignments across its supply chain through IBM’s blockchain.
Alongside them are Gruppo 24 Ore, a media firm based in Italy, Spanish digital health provider Teckel Medical, UK-based RS Components and lighting solutions firm Osram AG, based in Germany.
Last month at CeBIT, IBM announced 18 new availability zones across the North America, Europe and Asia Pacific regions, among other launches designed around security and privacy. “Our new availability zones and regions architecture is the next step in the evolution of our public cloud platform, and it’ll immediately reinforce and supplement the broad portfolio of infrastructure, platform, and software services that our clients trust to fuel their businesses,” wrote Andrew Hately, VP, DE and chief architect IBM Watson and Cloud Platform at the time.
Speaking to this publication back in February, John Considine, IBM general manager of cloud infrastructure services, cited the importance of extracting data to glean actionable insights for businesses as key – with the emerging technologies forming part of these extraction methods.
“One of our theories leading into the cloud, for the past few years, is that data is enormously important for the enterprises – and given more than 80% of the world’s data is still maintained behind the corporate firewall, our focus has been how… we enable the businesses to take advantage of that data, to combine it with new processing techniques, new data sets, and new capabilities,” Considine said.
“[It’s about] all the things associated with machine learning and deep learning, analytics and bringing all of these things together in a form that allows them to tap into those resources and deliver not only application modernisation, but really even process reinvention,” he added.
It is important to note, as Considine did, how much data is in less-than-easy spots. IBM punted out a similar statistic – that almost 80% of all enterprise data is still managed on the mainframe – when a new partnership with CA Technologies was announced last month.